The Wreck of the 'Trimethian Star'
by Roseveare
Summary: Doctor Who Crossover Companion Ficathon story: 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa, Adric, & Jake Foley The TARDIS responds to a centuries old distress call. But how much of an advantage are nanites where alien technology is involved? WIP
1. Chapter 1

TITLE: The Wreck of the _Trimethian Star_  
AUTHOR: roseveare  
RATING: PG-13  
SUMMARY: With new companion Jake Foley on board, the TARDIS responds to a centuries-old distress call. But how much of an advantage _are_ nanites where alien technology is involved?  
NOTES: Written for the _Doctor Who_ Choose-Your-Own-Companion crossover ficathon - the 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa & Adric, and _Jake 2.0_'s Jake Foley.  
WARNINGS: Crackfic. I make no promises to avoid the obvious in dialogue, plotting, fights, bad jokes, gratuitous mentions of Australian beer, and quite possibly teh sex. You have been warned.  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.

* * *

**The Wreck of the _Trimethian Star_****Chapter 1**

Tegan didn't know what to make of the new bloke, but then that was pretty par for the course when you were sharing living space with strangers picked up from 20 years in your own planet's future. Somehow that freaked her out more than sharing living space with aliens. Especially when this stranger could turn the lights on and off with his brain. That was a handy trick. Going into convulsions when the Doctor threw the take-off control on the TARDIS was less handy. And she really hoped he'd been joking when he made that crack about x-ray vision. She was fairly sure he'd been joking. But he had turned a funny shade of red, and still wasn't able to meet her eyes.

He was American, which Tegan thought probably explained a lot anyway. But apparently he had saved Nyssa's life from the alien cat-things that the Doctor had called a name like 'sminnigles' - unless it really had been 'smurfniggles', and who the hell came up with these names anyway?

She was reserving final judgement until he recovered the use of his larynx within her presence.

She wouldn't have pegged government agents as the type the Doctor would invite to hop on board for a ride, and even if this one was enough of a goof to counter the initial impression of suit-badge-gun and "come with us to answer a few questions", she strongly suspected an ongoing conspiracy against her, personally, because he liked maths and (obviously) computers, too - and if they didn't get someone normal around here soon she was going to go nuts.

Bad enough when Nyssa, Adric and the Doctor got together. She couldn't contend with four of them.

She stuck her toe into the swimming pool. The water was perfect. Her own running dive definitely wasn't, but what the hell. She wasn't sure how long she'd have to take advantage of the pool before the TARDIS managed to lose it again. It was big and circular and glitteringly pristine, and it had roundels on the sides (well, of course it did) and she'd found it off a corridor near her own room that definitely wasn't there last week.

Tegan hadn't been swimming about for very long when she almost jumped out of her skin as a familiar voice spoke up. "I wondered where you were hiding."

It wasn't really possible to cover up her reflexive jump, given the splash it made. She almost choked as she turned and saw the Doctor looking utterly ridiculous in some type of Victorian bathing costume. It had red stripes.

"You look like you should be carrying a big sack saying 'SWAG' on it," she told him. She hugged her arms over her chest and felt exposed.

Her comment didn't make a dint in him. She doubted he even noticed. "You _are_ hiding from us, aren't you?" he asked, faintly perplexed, as he sat on the side of the pool and dangled his feet in the water. It didn't exactly give him any of his dignity back.

"I'm hiding from the science convention," Tegan clarified, "and I'll come out when you've all finished fixing robo-boy's nanobots so I can actually talk to someone without having the words 'artron energy' crop up in the conversation."

"Oh dear," the Doctor said. He frowned at his feet, wriggling his toes to make ripples in the water. Tegan gave up on modesty and pushed off from the side of the pool to swim another length - another diameter - perpendicular to him. "I suppose we have all been a little intense, haven't we?" She surfaced long enough to glimpse him flap his hands helplessly and sigh. "This isn't turning out to be much of a fun trip for anyone, is it?"

She halted where she was, treading water. "I don't begrudge you fixing the bloke. All I'm saying is that I'm not coming out until it's done."

"Of the pool?"

"Of exile." She rolled her eyes at him. "I'm not ready to turn myself into a prune just yet."

"Well, that's excellent." He beamed. "On both counts."

Tegan stopped moving and promptly sank. Emerged again spluttering water. "Robo-boy's fixed?"

"Indeed. Well, we've managed to block out the interference from the artron energy - sorry, Tegan - so as long as he keeps his brain away from the TARDIS's circuitry, he should be fine. As for the rest, I can't begin to catalogue the flaws in the technology the NSA filled that young man's body with." He tutted. "Call themselves scientists!"

She splashed water at him. "You couldn't have told me that first?"

"Oh." She heard disappointment in his voice as he watched her swim for the side and climb out of the water. "I thought we were having a swim." He half-heartedly flicked water back at her with his toes. He had better aim, but she was already soaked head to foot and didn't care. She stuck her tongue out at him.

"You swim," she said, averting her eyes again. "I think your swimsuit already did me enough permanent mental damage."

* * *

_Aliens_, Jake thought. Again.

His brain was having difficulty getting past the 'whoa' stage, even though a slightly irritated part of it that wanted to be much more aloof and professional was of the view that it should be getting old, not to mention boring, by now.

But _Aliens_. Real ones. He'd always kinda thought that if there was anything out there, it wouldn't look like the _X-files'_ big-eyed Greys. And now he knew, since he was travelling with three of them (and an angry Australian woman from twenty years ago who had apparently been abducted and had already made three loud demands in his hearing to be returned to Heathrow), and they looked exactly like humans did.

Then there were the other things, the cat things, and the kid who'd said he came from the planet Alzarius in a whole other _universe_ had _crowed_ as he bragged about all the other shapes and sizes of beings that they'd met along the way. Most of them apparently unfriendly, although Nyssa, an alien from a planet called Traken that didn't exist any more, had spoken up in quiet defence of a handful of their encounters.

Terrorist plots, dirty bombs and electromagnetic pulses wouldn't get a bat of an eyelid out of these people, Jake figured.

He wondered, briefly, how Kyle had explained away the cat things to Lou - not to mention the loss of a half billion dollar agent full of nanites - when the team got back without him. But then, he reminded himself, and the thought sprung out onto his face as a grin big as a dinnerplate, the Doctor _had_ promised to get him back to Washington DC yesterday once he'd seen enough of the universe. They'd never even know he'd been gone.

He should probably feel guilty for dropping his responsibilities so quickly, but when an alien offered you a ride in his time-machine-slash-spaceship, no self-respecting geek was ever going to pause to give thought to the day job, no matter what the day job was.

It was the _ship_ that Jake couldn't get over. Well, the _ship_ and the _aliens_. But on balance the ship likely had been on his mind a bit more, ever since they took off and the nanites seemed to explode inside his skull. The next twenty-four hours had seen their trip across time and space halted indefinitely for an emergency stop while the Doctor tried to figure out how to shield off the nanites from the energies that flowed through the TARDIS in 'flight'. That had been a bit embarrassing - on both their sides, Jake suspected, from the earnest fervour with which the Doctor had apologised.

But the ship itself, now that all of that was fixed... hopefully fixed... Whoa.

It was the first time he'd had chance to really look around, and 'bigger on the inside' was one thing, but this wasn't just a flight deck with a couple of corridors leading off it. This was a craft the size of a freakin' city, maybe a state, inside an eight-foot-tall box.

He followed his nose down another corridor, nervously taking the Doctor at his word and keeping faith that the TARDIS intercom would prevent him from getting himself too lost. His head ached dully, after-effect from the rampage of the artron energy through it, and he hadn't slept in two days, but there wasn't anything in the universe could make him relax and try to sleep right now. He was on a _spaceship. And_ a time machine.

He had asked what the round things on the walls were for. Nyssa had opened her mouth, blinked a few times, and turned her own ponderous gaze onto the round panels in deep contemplation. He'd tried to ask the Doctor, too, but all _he'd_ done was to airily say they provided good feng shui as he brushed off in search of the frighteningly loud Australian woman.

Jake paused where he stood as a door he'd been passing seemed to creep ajar of its own accord. It had to be a coincidence - the Doctor might talk about his vessel as though it were alive, but nobody else did. Still, now the open door was staring at him like a challenge, and he couldn't help but to investigate.

He couldn't have anticipated anything less than the sight that greeted him as the door pushed back.

The room was full to the brim with arcade games - Earth technology. Earth _classics_. They practically sang at him through the nanites' supposedly quiescent interface, after being surrounded by so much alien technology that either evaded contact or actively hurt to touch.

And despite being on an alien spaceship, despite his excitement at so much that was new, he spent the next two hours locked in joyful contest with the familiar, right up until Adric stuck his head around the door.

The boy chastised him in brusque teenage fashion for being late for dinner and thus causing he, Adric, to have to wait longer for food while he ran stupid errands to fetch silly humans - then guided him back to rejoin the rest of the irregulars on the TARDIS's crew.

* * *

The planet had only a number instead of a name in the TARDIS databanks, and it didn't seem that anything of interest had ever happened there, or ever would happen there either. But it did have nice grass, and trees heavy with fruit that tested as safe to eat, and the weather was sunny. All in all, it was a perfect place to sit outside the TARDIS and have a picnic. The Doctor all too evidently thought so, and set about organising them all enjoying themselves with his usual enthusiasm. But as it happened, Nyssa thought so too.

She could use some rest and peace. She frowned down at the bandage on her arm where the srinoglesh warrior had struck her, before a human government agent enhanced by primitive technology had saved her life. Yes, she could certainly use some peace.

She looked up from cutting sandwiches into neat triangles and stacking them onto plates when the TARDIS door opened again, and smiled at Jake Foley as he stepped out.

He paused as though struck. Stared around as if suddenly, inexplicably shocked by what he saw. Puzzled, Nyssa followed his gaze around the expansive grasslands to the distant red and purple trees.

"I'm on another planet," he said, and she understood. His face transformed from shock to absolute joy in a moment as he spoke. His sparkling eyes found hers, and she laughed, enjoying his enthusiasm, which was almost as enthusiastic and wide-eyed as the Doctor's. Like the Doctor, he could seem so innocent. But she'd seen him kill. Just as she knew that the Doctor was no real innocent. She did not allow her expression to change. He had saved her life.

Behind him, ungracefully sitting in the grass with her knees bent up and elbows rested upon them, Tegan rolled her eyes.

Adric emerged from the TARDIS behind Jake, completing their party. He ducked around the tall human and stole a sandwich almost from under Nyssa's fingers before she could stop him. "_Adric_," she began, with fond exasperation.

"Now, now, Adric. Manners," the Doctor said, disapprovingly yet without paying the events any great attention. He was just walking back, absently juggling the fruits he'd collected. He tossed the fruits one apiece to each of them without losing the rhythm of the spinning yellow spheres. When he was left with only one, that too continued to rise up and down in his hand as he sank back into the deckchair he'd earlier pulled from the TARDIS store.

"_Food_," Adric corrected indistinctly, smirking around the sandwich he'd stuffed whole into his mouth.

Jake, distracted, had fumbled his catch. While he gave chase down the gentle slope, Nyssa handed around the sandwiches to everyone else. When Jake came back, yellow fruit in hand and looking a bit flustered, and seated himself on the grass to join them, she handed him his sandwiches, too. The scratch marks that had been on his arm, she noted again as he took the plate, were long gone. So maybe 'primitive' technology had its uses after all. She should not scoff.

The meal was pleasant, and Nyssa delighted in the flashes of blue and yellow as bright and fast little native birds flitted about the trees, venturing out once the group had fallen silent to eat. That was why she was tempted into doing a very foolish thing. As she peeled the skin from the remaining piece of her fruit, she said to the Doctor, "We should stay here awhile. Can you think of any better place to recover?"

"It is idyllic," the Doctor agreed. "But you do realise there's nothing here more than what you see? Nothing but grass, and trees, and yellow birds and yellow fruit as far as the eye can see - or more pointedly, as far as the TARDIS can see, and she sees a lot further than you or I. There isn't much to explore."

"That," Tegan said a bit abrasively, "I think was her point, Doctor."

His face fell.

"I could use the time to collect some samples of the vegetation," Nyssa prompted. "The readings the TARDIS took suggested some interesting medicinal properties in the fruit. Perhaps that extends to other specimens here. It's clear no spacefaring race has found and utilized this planet. Perhaps we might discover something."

"Well," the Doctor said reluctantly, "If you're all keen to stay..."

Jake looked as though he'd be happy anywhere that wasn't Earth - she could practically see the thought 'Alien planet!', complete with exclamation mark, still written loud upon his face. Tegan's expression spoke about as plainly as it could do that she couldn't care less so long as they weren't being chased by anything nasty or, more relevantly to her friend's most recent experiences, being held and questioned by government troops. Adric was eying the fruit trees like they were dessert. Nyssa couldn't see any obvious objections, and nobody made any.

"I think it would be a good idea to take a few days to regroup," she started to say, firmly stating her decision.

And that, of course, was when they all heard the warning siren from inside the TARDIS.

More like a claxon, really, it blared out through the open door and made them all jump. In the Doctor's case, it made him jump up from his deckchair like he'd been offered a reprieve, and dash back into the TARDIS.

Nyssa sighed, and copied the others as they picked up themselves and their scattered things, and followed him inside.

"What's happening?" asked Jake, wincing. Tegan actually had her hands over her ears, and Nyssa didn't envy him his enhanced hearing.

"It's not the TARDIS!" the Doctor shouted back with too-cheerful brisk efficiency. "Or rather, she's receiving somebody else's distress signal!"

"A distress signal, out here?" Adric scoffed. "Nyssa said it - there's nothing out here. If there was, this planet would have been colonised long ago."

"It's distant," the Doctor said with a touch of short temper, "But it's most definitely there. Maybe you should consult your ears, Adric. I suspect it's been there all along, but it's so distant that even the TARDIS's sensors have taken this long to detect the signal amidst the background cosmic interference." He stabbed at the controls, and the noise faded to a memory. "Ah. That's better."

"Should we go to help?" Tegan's question held obvious trepidation but no real doubt as to their presumed course of action.

The Doctor hesitated, surprising Nyssa. "It's likely the signal's old," he said, "But there may still be someone in need of aid. We must try to provide it."

"A rescue mission?" Jake Foley asked, a keen spark igniting in him. Missions, Nyssa remembered, were his vocation. Not merely something that circumstance and a crotchety time/space machine kept throwing him into.

"Indeed!" exclaimed the Doctor, his face equally alight.

_Two of them_, thought Nyssa, with a contradictorily _sinking_ feeling of wonder.

She also wondered, not for the first time, if the Doctor's asking him along had really been such a very good idea.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

"This is some ship." Jake winced as his awed whisper bounced metallically back at him, echoed around the cavernous empty space. The TARDIS was impressive, and weird, and mathematics-defying, but _this_ was what he'd always imagined when he thought of a _spaceship_!

As though plucking the thought from his brain (Jake didn't think he could actually mind-read), the Doctor looked perturbed. But the alien only said mildly, "I think the TARDIS is in rather better state of repair than _this_." He tracked his flashlight around the walls, and Jake had to hurriedly turn away, raising a hand to shield his eyes and his night-vision. It was a relief that some things still worked, with half his powers crippled by these alien environs.

The Doctor was right, though. When it was shiny and new, this might have been the starship of his imaginings, with its sleek lines and glimmering, expansive spaces, and massive arrays of controls like Sat Ops could only dream of. But that had been a long time ago.

In the meantime, the outside world had gotten in. The hull had obviously been breached in the crash, probably in more than one place, although that fact aside the body of the ship seemed to have survived remarkably well, evidently constructed from materials that didn't corrode easily in atmosphere and damp conditions. But there were cotton-wool-like growths nestled in corners, clearly the planet's equivalent of spider-webs, and a layer of dust on the skewed off-level floor. Where the floor sloped down to its maximum depth in one corner, and the dust layer had thickened into a muddy paste, there were even straggly alien plants that could subsist in the minimal light the mud-obscured viewscreens up front afforded. Elsewhere, moulds clung to floor and walls.

"It looks like its been here for years," Jake said.

"Maybe hundreds of years," the Doctor agreed, striding to the main control panels.

"Hundreds? Then it's a wonder that signal's still broadcasting, surely? Can we be completely sure it came from here?" He voiced his doubts tentatively, aware that he was very much out of his depth.

"Oh, for certain," the Doctor said dismissively, and Jake suspected he'd not even noticed the question's caution. He waved his hands expressively, making Jake blink again to avoid the beam from the flashlight. "Most of the damage is purely cosmetic. I should think several systems are still capable of running. And while I don't recognise the specific technology, the power supply looks to be self-renewing. Its working life would be considerable."

Jake stared around the control room again, examining everything closely. The ship looked dead to him. "You really think there is anything still live here?"

The Doctor straightened sharply from where he'd leaned over to examine the controls. "You don't feel anything?"

"I'd rather not try," Jake admitted.

"Oh... yes, I can see how that might be the case. But you needn't worry about encountering the sort of backlash experienced with the TARDIS. I can assure you there's nothing remotely like those kinds of energies behind the operation of this vessel."

Behind which he read that the Doctor was interested, and had at his disposal a tool that could provide answers. Jake wasn't unfamiliar with the situation. Six months working for the NSA had made him over-familiar with it, and he could recognise it pretty well. Although, single-minded as it was, the Doctor's interest was motivated by a pure kind of curiosity compared with the NSA's motives. Jake didn't mind. It wasn't as though he didn't look for ways to make himself useful - it had only seemed sensible, for example, that the one combat-ready member of their crew accompany the Doctor in his initial exploration of the crashed ship. (And despite her comments before about the Doctor's leading them all into danger, Jake had the definite impression that the caustic Australian wasn't impressed by the suggestion.)

But he found himself without any answers for the Doctor beyond a shake of his head. "I don't sense anything." The other man's disappointment was so keen he felt compelled to add, "The nanites' range is pretty limited. Something could be online elsewhere on board. Or maybe the systems are hibernating. Or they aren't anything I could sense at all anyway."

"Perhaps." The Doctor seemed to have moved on to other thoughts. "What I haven't seen yet is any bodies. Have you?"

"Maybe they all got out, or the survivors retrieved them. You said this planet was life-sustaining." _Duh_. The ship was about as airtight as a colander. Neither he nor the Doctor would be breathing right now if it wasn't. Not unless the nanites and whatever the Doctor was could handle prolonged oxygen deprivation. Jake fell silent.

"Or maybe they're dust." The Doctor directed his flashlight down, to the dull dusty layer on the floor. Jake felt compelled to move his feet, but there was nowhere to move them to that was completely free of the residue. "But no." The flashlight whipped back up again. "The accelerated decomposition is possible, depending on the skeletal structure of whichever species this craft carried and the corrosives present in the atmosphere, but it's far more likely you're right." He returned to poking at the controls, with a focus that suggested he searched this time for something specific.

"One thing that we do know for sure is that they're a century or several beyond our help or anyone else's - aha!" He stabbed at a button, which had no visible effect so far as Jake could see. "It's only the responsible thing to do - no sense anybody else diverting their course to follow that distress beacon," he explained as he turned back. "We should get back to the TARDIS before Tegan, Nyssa and Adric start wondering what's--"

The Doctor froze. The change in his expression was alarming to see on the confident and cheerfully self-controlled alien. He voiced one strained word that spoke volumes. "No..."

And Jake knew this scene. He'd seen it in a hundred horror movies. _There's something behind me_...

Something the Doctor had recognised. Something the Doctor was deathly afraid of. From what he'd seen of the Doctor so far (fearlessly facing down genocidal alien cat-things without a weapon in his hand, nor any sign he _wanted_ a weapon in his hand) he _really_ didn't want to meet whatever that was.

There weren't too many options, facing the wrong way and blind to the danger. Jake chose _up_.

There was a ventilation grill in the roof, fifteen feet above their heads. He caught it with his fingers, almost losing his grip as his right hand punched through one of the cotton-ball nests and it ejected something the size of a golf ball with _far_ more legs than a spider, that promptly bit him and scuttled off. He cursed, salvaged his grip, and looked down.

The thing that had been behind him was a four- or five-foot-high robot... thing, shaped vaguely like a cylinder that tapered slightly toward the top, punctuating in a dome-like 'head'. For features it had an eyestalk and two antennae. It seemed to move with an almost gliding motion across the floor towards the Doctor, its eyestalk swivelling up to note Jake's position.

So did one of the other, arm-like protuberances previously unnoticed below the eye. It was the Doctor's urgent warning cry that made Jake move, before he'd processed his own realisation that it was a weapon.

The grill exploded behind him, his body barely clearing the path of the weapon's fire in time. Unfortunately he hadn't gauged where he was going particularly well, missed the sparse handholds and crashed down onto the middle of the big control bank behind the Doctor.

"EXTERMINATE!" blared the robot in a metallic voice. "EXTERMINATE THE INTRUDERS! YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS! EXTERMINATE!"

"Now, let's talk about this," the Doctor began. Jake raised his head, quashing a groan. The Doctor was backing off slowly as he spoke, trying to distract the robot and lead it away. But the robot had him cut off in a moment, and the Doctor's reasonable tone disintegrated into an angry, anguished, "You can't _be_ here. This isn't right--"

The robot fired again as Jake moved, but it fired over the control panel and missed him as he crouched low. At the same time, the Doctor dived behind a smaller control bank. "It's protecting the ship!" he called. "Stay behind key systems and it won't dare risk damaging them!" Jake could hear him scrabble away from the thing - the dalek? - as it tried to round the console. Impossible to clearly make out the words he was muttering to himself amid the dalek's shrill metallic voice and the grind of its ambulatory mechanism, but Jake thought he caught 'something not right about this...'

No kidding.

"How do we stop it!" Jake yelled, trying to negotiate his way into a better position. Unfortunately his new choice of shield obviously wasn't a key system. He recoiled as the controls exploded in sparks and the back of it turned red-hot to the touch.

"Jake, wait-- No!" The Doctor's head rose from cover, alarm in his voice.

Unfortunately Jake couldn't heed the warning. With no cover left in easy reach, attack was his only chance. He sprang onto the robot, finding footholds and finger holds in the grill beneath its upper section, trying to stay above the level of the weapons at its front.

"Careful not to touch its gun - go for the eyestalk--" the Doctor instructed, helplessly ducking from another blast.

Jake was already moving, craning forward to curl his palm over the end of its electronic eye. The robot spun crazily, and he clung desperately in place. Then--

He was on the floor with his head full of blue sparks. Everything hurt, and his limbs fizzed with a sensation that felt less like the organic aftermath of a shock than electric signal interference. The smell of burnt flesh was strong. Somewhere close by, there was an awful lot of noise. He raised his head painfully and stared at the object still clutched in his burned right hand.

"MY VISION IS IMPAIRED! I CANNOT SEE!" The droning robot was spinning in circles, not three feet from where he sprawled. He tried to raise himself onto all fours to crawl clear of it, and hands grabbed him under the arms, lending much-needed assistance.

"What the--?"

"Shh."

There was smoke rising from the back of the frustrated robot now. As Jake watched, whatever circuit overload its blindness had induced reached critical stage and it - quite literally - blew its top.

Instinct raised his arms in front of his face as a shield from the debris. The explosion seemed to echo a long time in the subsequent silence.

Jake looked up at the Doctor, whose stare was fixed not on him, but through the smoke. "What the hell was that?" His own voice sounded hoarse. Hardly surprising.

"I don't know... but it wasn't a dalek."

Jake turned back sharply, following his gaze to where the thing had been. It wasn't there. Nothing was there. Even the smoke was gone, and if it hadn't been for the still-sizzling control panel and destroyed grill, there might never have been any fight at all.

"What - what the hell just happened?" Jake scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes, then glanced quickly around. "Will there be any more of those things?" The palms of his hands were burned; his left knee, his right ankle, the toes and sides of his feet where they'd caught through his shoes - wherever he'd been in contact with the robot when it shocked him.

"I don't know..." The Doctor was also keeping a keen eye on their surroundings, but there was contemplation in his face as well. He stood and briskly brushed himself off, then reached down with both hands to grasp Jake's unharmed wrists and help him up. "It was a defence mechanism!" he announced, with the rather out-of-place blissful satisfaction of a puzzle solved. He waved an illustrative finger in Jake's face. "Some form of telepathic sensory technology, taking from our minds the enemy we should least like to face and projecting it as a tactile hologram. How very clever!"

"It wasn't real?" Jake felt a bit disappointed. After all, he'd thought he handled the fight pretty well.

"Oh, it would still have killed us if you hadn't... taken care of matters." He frowned at the empty space where the destroyed dalek wasn't. "The daleks are an old enemy. Totally ruthless, totally dedicated to destruction. Let's hope the technology here doesn't pluck any more out of our thoughts, eh?" He clapped Jake on the arm, and did an abrupt double-take. His frown intensified. "You'll be all right?"

"Uh... It'll heal." Jake stumbled a bit over the reassurance, still not used to talking openly about this with people who didn't have security clearance. Lou would blow _her_ top if she knew. "A day or two, at most."

"Good... good." The Doctor's concentration was elsewhere again - it didn't seem that it ever stayed in one place for very long, much like the man himself. "Well, one thing that we know for certain - there are definitely still active systems in here. That kind of technology doesn't have much range, and it needs a sophisticated computer's control. Before we get you back to the TARDIS, how about giving it another try?"

Jake was honestly more concerned about the security system trying to kill them again with things that didn't exist. "The dalek--"

His protest was waved off. "I doubt we'll be seeing any more of those for the time being. Likely the feedback from the hologram's destruction shorted the circuits, but even if it didn't the power drain must have been immense - base levels will need to be restored. I should probably find those systems and cut the power before we leave. It wouldn't do to have anyone else wandering in unknowing and getting hurt."

Jake supposed it wouldn't, but the ship's systems still remained elusive, making it academic. Or... no, maybe his interface _had_ touched something, very briefly, only to slide off it again. Like it was a smooth surface, and the nanites unable to find any purchase. He shook his head. "There's something... I can't touch it. It's too alien. Or too well defended." _Or both._

"Never mind," the Doctor said, patting his shoulder. "I shall bring Nyssa and Adric back here to investigate the ship's systems the old fashioned way."

Nyssa? Jake could imagine all too well how the girl would fare against another creature like that. And Adric was just a kid. But it seemed that for the Doctor it was no concern to expose his troop of non-combatants to such dangers. Jake grimaced. He knew this was how these people worked - how they had been working for a long time before he stumbled into them - but on this occasion, it felt like it was his failing that made it necessary for them to take the risk.

The Doctor saw his dismay, even in the half light - and Jake did suspect that the Doctor's alien physiology included a degree of night vision too. He had lost his flashlight, but he did not seem to struggle to see.

"Not your fault. Come along, Jake. Tegan and the others really will be wondering where we are."

Despite the Doctor's reassuring words and mild tone, it definitely seemed to Jake that he was not having the best of success so far in his stint on this crew. But he let the 800-plus year old alien take his arm and help him to negotiate the awkwardly skewed floor, and they limped slowly back to the TARDIS.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

"So you're awake at last," Tegan grumped, eying the young man with a bad case of bed-hair as he stumbled slowly into the console room. He looked blearily at her and tried to scrape his hair out of his eyes and into some sort of order. Instead he ended up frowning at the gauzy bandages on his burned hands as though seeing them for the first time. She winced and turned her face away as he picked at the edges of them.

"Jesus. Do you feel better for that?" she asked, disgusted. It was a man thing, she decided, like picking at scabs,

He said, "They're healing," in faintly wounded protest.

Somewhere in the TARDIS he had found clothes to replace the government-issue spook-suit that had been smouldering, and stinking of crisped flesh besides, when the Doctor had half-carried him back into the TARDIS some hours ago. Surprisingly to Tegan, he hadn't picked out another suit, but too-big jeans and a 'KISS' T-shirt from a tour she didn't recognise so assumed was from her future. And she'd thought he made the _suit_ look scruffy.

"Right." She'd forgotten about the healing. All right for some. Of course, some didn't have alien technology threatening to make their brain dribble out of their ears either.

He shuffled around with his arms hugged to his chest, probably to prevent himself automatically reaching out to touch anything. She figured he was either sparing his hands or trying to avoid landing himself at the other end of the galaxy... and yeah, that was probably a good idea. She had a flash of the time she had tried to mess with the TARDIS herself, and cringed from the memory.

After a couple of minutes he'd worked his way back around to where she sat at the little table she'd brought into the console room to work on. After another few minutes of quietly irritating looming, he just beat her to a response (and he wouldn't have liked hers), asking, "What are you doing?"

She sighed and flopped back in her chair, scattering pieces, disgusted with the puzzle and the company alike - and the Doctor, too, for that matter, for sloping off and leaving her to look after robo-boy and the TARDIS, neither of which needed or wanted looking after anyhow, as far as she could tell. "It's some kind of wretched 3D puzzle from... somewhere beginning with an 'M'." She glared at the bits of it. "I should have settled for a crossword."

Jake's face had lit up, annoyingly, just as she could have predicted it would. "I like puzzles." He looked askance at her before sliding into the second chair when she responded with a weary shrug.

Tegan stayed sat back and watched him bow his scruffy head over the pieces. He worked at them with his fingertips, sliding them along the glittering spars where they ought to lock into place. "This looks like it should... no. Or maybe this could fit here, then... no. Oh, I see!" A moment later; "Well, maybe not."

She tried not to laugh - it was too cruel - but a snort escaped from her nonetheless, and she couldn't hide her smirk. "You've got no more idea about this thing than I do. Admit it!"

"Freely." Undisguised challenge in his voice where she'd expected evasion and bluster made her blink. "Everything here is from another world. Except you, I suppose. But the alienness, I guess it gets... less exciting and more wearing once the novelty wears off."

"You're telling me?" she scoffed. _'You who've been here all of five minutes'_ lurked under her voice. She heard it there and winced at herself. As reparation, she picked up one of the puzzle pieces and slid it into place somewhere that looked right. "I think they go like this. At least, it seems to be working so far." On all the pathetic dozen or so of the pieces that she'd managed to lock into place, out of upwards of a hundred.

"Ah." Comprehension flooded his face and he regained some of his earlier enthusiasm.

Noticing that crystallised her attention upon something she had noticed in all aspects of him, actually, since he'd come back injured. His stratospheric high in the face of everything new and alien, which had even failed to be dented by the technical problems at take-off, had finally gone. "So much for the combat-ready advance party," she'd said when the Doctor brought him back, mocking his earlier words, and that probably hadn't helped. But it hadn't been the catalyst either; the starry-eyed spark had been gone before that.

She doubted it was his injuries. He played them down, and from the way he spoke he'd healed from worse plenty of times. Maybe, she thought uncharitably, he was discovering that it wasn't as easy to play the superhero out here as it was on Earth.

Despite being fed up with the puzzle, she did persevere a bit longer, trying to help Jake out until he caught the hang of it. They'd placed about half the pieces by the time she stood up, kicking her chair back. "The annoying thing is that Adric or Nyssa or the Doctor would have finished this in about five minutes." She scowled. "You know what? I'm going out."

"Out?" Jake repeated in alarm. He stood, the puzzle forgotten.

"Yeah." She flopped a hand vaguely towards him. "You... you're okay here, and I need some air. I spent most of the last few days locked in a cell, thanks to your people, and one thing the TARDIS doesn't have is open skies." She paused for a double-take and added, "I don't think." With the TARDIS, you could never be sure.

"We're in a spaceship," Jake protested. "A crashed spaceship. Nobody's been outside. We don't know what's out there!"

"We know the air's breathable. And the Doctor said the two of you passed an opening in the hull on your way back. So that's fine with me." She headed for the door, palming the spare key from the console.

"Wait--!" He was dashing back through the door that led into the TARDIS' maze of corridors.

"What for?" Tegan snapped.

"I need to find some shoes!"

"Who said you were invited along?" she protested, but he was out of sight. She leaned on the door and tapped her feet until he stumbled back wearing a pair of undeniably fluffy slippers. They were blue.

Her stare reddened his face. "Don't say anything. I couldn't find shoes that I could fit into, with the bandages."

"You don't have to come at all," Tegan said. Although she didn't say it too vehemently. The truth of the matter was that she'd made her decision hastily, knew it was probably foolish, and _would_ feel safer with him along. Even if he was limping. Especially when she noticed that, as well as footwear, he'd come back with his gun. The bulge of the pistol was a bit obvious beneath his T-shirt.

The Doctor would certainly disapprove. But Tegan wasn't about to complain.

* * *

"The technology here is innovative rather than advanced. Likely why it's taken so long for someone to pick up that distress call - the TARDIS monitors communication channels through all known sub-space dimensions, and this technology's successfully incorporated hijacking a few of those for its function," the Doctor mused, prodding an exposed circuit board with his index finger - unwisely as it turned out. He shook his hand out and sucked his burned fingertip. Unconcerned, he craned his head up to Nyssa. "Innovative," he repeated. "Wouldn't you say?"

"I think that it's old." Nyssa wrinkled her nose as she lifted a partially decayed component in her fingers. "Old and useless. I can barely believe the defensive systems were in sufficient working shape to provide any threat, however 'innovative'." She tossed the component into a pile of the same. "Was it really so dangerous?"

"You've seen that young man fight." The Doctor spoke distractedly, and indistinctly around his finger, while he worked one-handed on the circuit board. His jacket was slung over a panel behind them, and he in rolled-up sleeves. There were dark, dusty marks on his pale clothes.

"I have." She stared intently at the back of his head. "I was surprised when you asked him to come with us."

"Really? I thought you seemed to be getting along rather well."

She could have been talking to herself, Nyssa saw, for the impact that this conversation was having on him. She sighed. "I do like him. I only said that I was surprised. Jake is a soldier. Fighting... violence... is his duty. Taking him away from his people - I don't believe that takes those things away from him."

He looked up at her again, but archly. "Duty? And that's all a person is, is it, Nyssa of Traken?"

She pressed her lips tight to rein in an angry response to the mention of her dead world. She had had to find other things than the duty of her old life. But that didn't mean that, in some way, they weren't still the same duties, helping the Doctor. Or that she didn't want to answer the Doctor's question '_yes_'. "I've seen him fight," she said stubbornly, once she'd regained her control. "I've seen him kill." And bringing death hadn't been a pleasure for him, it was certain, but neither had it been unfamiliar. She had seen the acquaintance in his eyes.

"Well..." She thought he looked mildly disappointed for a moment, before he turned back to his work. "Let's say we give him a chance, eh, Nyssa? I've known a few military men who were decent enough chaps in the end, myself."

"Yes, Doctor," Nyssa said blandly, giving up. And in all honesty, she wasn't sure why it galled her, and was a little uncomfortable that it did. But it just... wasn't the way they did things. All of them, in the TARDIS, were people who believed in solutions of peace. Jake Foley's NSA most certainly had not. And even if the individual represented the best of them, as assuredly he did from what she had seen, she balked at the idea of having any representative of that organisation travelling with the TARDIS. Now he was here, and he was already fighting -- again.

"One thing for certain - I wouldn't want to tangle with that security system a second time." The Doctor's voice was a jolt. He'd followed her gaze to a scorched patch where the brownish dust had been blackened.

"An illusion, you said."

"A facsimile," he corrected. "Of a very dangerous foe... And I haven't seen anything here that looks like the relevant systems." He stood up briskly, and made a pointless attempt to dust himself off. "How are you doing over there?"

Nyssa realised that in their conversation she was neglecting her duty, and looked down quickly, running her eyes over the lifeless connections and circuits in the panel she'd earlier removed. "Nothing. These circuits are all dead - no, wait--" She slid her hand to the back of the cavity carefully, catching the Doctor's concerned start and halted warning out of the corner of her eye. But she knew what she was doing.

"This is warm." It was the side of the cavity to which she referred. And it wasn't very warm, but it was enough to know that something adjoining had been active recently. She brushed the browned and dead lichen-like substance from her fingers, green and alive throughout the rest of the console's interior. She tapped the adjoining console. "This system has been operational."

He all but danced through the piles of their search's refuse to join her. "Oh, well done!" He slapped her shoulder rather enthusiastically, and since his hand was on her shoulder, she felt the change in him, felt him still. For a moment she thought there was another threat - perhaps that defences _had_ become active again. But then he said, his voice worn down by familiar weariness, "Where's Adric?"

"I--" She turned, glancing quickly around. "I thought he was over there, by that... door." She heard her own voice go just as grim.

"Adric!" the Doctor yelled. Only echoes met him. "Now, come on Adric, don't be foolish!" His frustration was clear.

"He can't have heard," Nyssa said, hoping to save Adric at least some of the immanent ticking off. "We'll have to find him."

The Doctor huffed. "Well, it looks like that console will have to wait until later." With a roll of his eyes, he swiped his coat up from where it lay and swept towards the door.

Nyssa more sedately followed.

* * *

Adric was bored. The Doctor and Nyssa were arguing about boring things and, as usual, paying him no attention at all. The Doctor had asked him to lend his help with the algorithms to bypass the defence computer when they found it - or the main computer, if they found that first. But since they hadn't yet found either, there was Adric, with nothing to do but stand in the corner and not touch anything, which the Doctor had told him to do.

He didn't know what was up with Tegan and Nyssa sulking about the new fellow anyway. At least it wasn't another _girl_.

Besides, neither Tegan or Nyssa had ever seen fit to be decently impressed by his mathematical abilities or the fact he'd come to this universe from E-space. Of course, the human's knowledge of numbers was hopelessly primitive and a little rusty besides, but considering how busy the Doctor always seemed lately, Adric was grateful to have anyone express interest in working on equations together.

Kicking at the dirt layer on the floor, he leaned against the wall - and fell backwards through it, right onto his... dignity. He was so surprised he didn't make much of a sound, and the Doctor and Nyssa were so engrossed in their talk and their work that they didn't notice, because there was no exclamation from them and no rush to help him up.

All business as normal, then.

Grumbling, Adric clambered to his feet and gave the door a well-deserved glaring at until it occurred to him to turn around and investigate what he'd fallen into, instead. Knowing his luck it would probably be the sanitary facilities. It really would be typical if Nyssa and the Doctor got the computers, and he got the centuries-disused toilet.

But instead it seemed the door led off to another part of the ship, forward of the bridge. He picked up his torch from the floor and directed the beam down a workmanlike corridor, smaller than the others they'd come along on the way to the bridge and much rougher in its finish. It had a feel of being the underbelly of the ship. Adric felt a peculiar thrill run through him at the sight of the regular round ports running along the left hand side of the corridor.

He stepped up to the first, running his hand around the port. It was crisper, cleaner, and a good deal less stained and corroded than the rest of the ship. This section, he thought, didn't have a breach. The door had been sealed, but the seal must have decayed over the years. It had given way easily to the pressure when he leaned against it, but still protected the space within for much of the intervening time.

The next port in sequence was just the same. The third was empty, and so was the fourth. There was a ladder running up the right hand side of the corridor just after the fourth. It held his weight when he tested the lower rungs, and he cautiously climbed the rest of the way. The hatch was open at the top and he raised his head slowly through it to peer into the space above. Here the walls, and the ports, were angled, leaning in at 45 degrees. The space was bigger, stretching back to fill the area above the bridge, no mere corridor. There were controls and storage racks running down the centre.

"Adric!" A hand yanked on his leg. Not hard, but he was so surprised he lost his grip and fell. The Doctor half caught him and was half landed on by him. This time he did cry out.

"What did you do that for?" he asked the Doctor accusingly as he picked himself up off the floor -- again.

"I _really_ don't know," the Doctor said, sounding extremely pained and earnest, also getting up and clutching his midriff, which Adric had landed on. Nyssa was laughing at them both.

"I thought I told you not to wander off," the Doctor said.

"You didn't," Adric complained. "--Well, you _didn't_. You told me to 'stay here and not touch anything'. Which I did - and didn't - until I fell through a door. I was just taking a look so I could tell you what I'd found."

"And what have you found?" asked Nyssa, puzzled by the excitable build-up in his tone, looking around the corridor and, in her naive way, seeing nothing. She got her question in before the Doctor had a chance to start berating him again, and Adric was grateful for that.

"Gun ports," Adric said. "Lots of gun ports. Some of them are still armed. _And_ there's a storage rack up there still half-full of missiles. This was a warship. An _enormous_ warship!"

* * *

"It's not what you might call accessible," Tegan griped, and added belligerently, "You could've told me."

"I wasn't exactly paying too much attention when we passed it before," Jake shot back, more aggressively than he'd intended because he was teetering on dodgy footing on a sheer mountainside wearing fluffy blue slippers and hampered by bandages on hands and feet, and the woman wasn't exactly helping him keep the concentration he needed to maintain his balance. She didn't react particularly to being snapped at, so he saved his apologies. He might need them later if her abrasiveness _really_ pushed him to lose it. "Do you want to return to the TARDIS?"

"No," she said, with a short stubbornness that, frustrating as it was, was also easy to admire. She gamely clambered down another three feet of rock and grass. Her little mid-high heels weren't a lot more suited to the terrain than slippers.

It was an awfully long way down.

If he looked behind him and upwards, he could see the hole in the downed spaceship, not ten yards distant yet. It was already hard to make out the shape of the vessel amid the jutting, narrow-bedded rocks of the mountainside. The opening looked almost natural, a part of the mountain.

Below them the treacherous slope was rock strata covered by loose rock (shaken loose in the original crash?) covered by many years of packed dirt and thickly-growing vegetation in the crevices. It continued for at least another hundred yards. Below that, the slope eased a fraction, the angle lessened minimally, and an even layer of coarse grass interposed by the occasional rocky outcrop promised easier progress.

A long, long way further down, there were cultivated fields and the unfamiliarly shaped buildings of an alien settlement. Unknown herd animals dotted a few of the fields.

"It doesn't look very threatening," Tegan said, and he realised she'd paused to wait for him, and followed the direction of his gaze. "I'll bet you're game to explore your first alien city."

At the moment, he'd prefer to be back in the TARDIS letting his injuries heal, but he said, with a fixed sort of effort at a smile, "Sure." Her determination seemed to have set in and he doubted the truth would turn her around, or improve her opinion of him.

Not that he could blame her for that opinion, given her introduction to him and the NSA.

It was hard-going down the slopes, and the nanites' healing was causing a distracting sensation of pins and needles in his hands and feet, right when he needed them most. But his balance was sharp and his reflexes saved him a few times - and Tegan, once, though she only seemed to resent him the more for it.

Once on the gentler grass slope the going was easier, and became more so the further they progressed. The heat of the sun hit them as they passed out of the mountain's shadow, and Tegan took her purple uniform jacket off and carried it rolled up in her hand. Jake could see the sun around the mountain for the first time - bigger than Earth's with a faint bluish quality around the corona. Everything else they'd seen here hadn't been so far removed from Earth, but spotting a difference in something so basic set off a thrill of oddness in him again. An alien planet.

He could also see, looking back up the mountain, that the crashed spaceship was made invisible by the distance. He set the location of the opening in mind carefully to be sure of remembering how to get back.

A half hour later and half the distance covered to the settlement, Tegan's top shirt buttons were undone, her sleeves rolled up, and her jacket raised to shade her head and eyes. And he sensed she was resenting him all the more. The nanites regulated body temperature pretty well, among their other functions. It had been a bone of contention with Kyle, too, in both warmer and colder climates.

"Wish we'd brought a drink," she said, dragging her arm across her face. "I could murder a few tins of Fosters."

Jake wholeheartedly agreed. "Maybe we could fetch something back, if the natives have beer. Smuggle it aboard the TARDIS."

Tegan grinned back. "We'd _have_ to smuggle it. The Doctor doesn't do alcohol."

Like he didn't do swearing, Jake thought, or guns. Somehow he hadn't expected real aliens to be so... 'G' rated. "Pity we don't have anything for money," he said, realising it with regret.

She unravelled her jacket to thrust a hand into a pocket, pulled out four or five flat metal squares, and grimaced. "Not unless they take Vandian doubloons."

"What are they made of?" Maybe silver would...

"Lead, I think." She poked at one with a fingernail, and returned them to her pocket. She swung the jacket over her shoulder and picked up her pace. "Come on. I'm parched. Maybe at least we can get some water for nothing."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

Tegan was thankful when they closed in on the odd-angled houses of the settlement and shortly reached the most outlying of the buildings. She doubted robo-boy needed the refreshment as he claimed he did, walking carefully behind her on his damaged feet with his breathing regular and his face dry. She, on the other hand, was sweating like a pig, which made her feel undignified and annoyed.

The predominant design of the buildings gave a triangular profile, with one wall straight and the opposing one sloping to meet it, with no need for a distinct roof. Some were tall and thin, some low, others twisted and played tricks with angles. The sun glistened whitely off them. Whatever they were made of was smooth and not recognisably stone, with no visible joins anywhere. With the first building, they met a sweep of road paved with triangular slabs and a smooth, sharp gravel that locked underfoot and didn't really shift. Tegan figured they were right out in the provinces - this settlement wasn't large, nothing that could be called a city, maybe not even a town.

Jake caught up and fell in at her side, matching her steps. He seemed to be walking easier now. A native in brightly coloured clothes was coming down the road towards them, and Tegan felt a knot of anticipation in her gut. She hoped they were friendly. As he came closer, she could see that he looked essentially human, with skin a shade darker than Caucasian. He nodded to them and made a smooth, easy hand gesture as they passed. Jake returned the gesture clumsily with one bandaged hand, and apparently all was well.

"The natives are friendly," Jake murmured with wary relief.

"Nice to know," Tegan said, grinning. "We might not do too badly down here after all." She started swinging her jacket jauntily at the end of her arm as they marched onward down the road.

There was a drinking fountain in the town square. She yanked her arm from Jake's grasp and snapped a short-tempered response to his "Is that wise?" -- "Well, they're drinking it, aren't they?" She'd seen a woman lower her head to the fountain while they approached.

"Maybe I should try, first, in case--"

"Maybe you should wait your turn, robo-boy." She touched her lips to the water and took a long drink.

Jake did wait his turn and drink after her, though she still suspected him of only doing it for show. After he'd straightened and turned away he said, looking around the square and not at her. "Nanite-boy."

"Whatever." The shops lining the square had signs and canopies as bright as the clothes the people wore. Tegan could read them, thanks to the TARDIS, although 'translation' didn't always equate with 'understanding' and she was unsure what some of the shops were. Jake was staring at them in particular surprise. She anticipated his exclamation and cut him off as he opened his mouth - "You can read them. It's something to do with the TARDIS. Don't ask me anything further, because I don't know."

"No, I..." He frowned at her. "You can read them?"

"You can't?" She was taken aback. She stared at him, her jaw dropping. "Crikey. That could be a problem the Doctor didn't think of."

Of course, the Doctor had told Jake to keep his brain away from the TARDIS, and so must have programmed the TARDIS to keep its... whatever... away from Jake. He would have to work on _that_ if Jake was going to be travelling with them any length of time.

"More fun," Jake said glumly.

She touched his arm in a bolstering gesture and he looked surprised. "I'm sure the Doc can sort it out... eventually." She mulled over the implication of that - back to the science convention and, like Jake said, more fun. Great.

A statue at the other side of the square caught her eye, and she headed over for a closer look, enchanted by the odd geometric beauty of it. She was aware of him trailing after her, dodging between some small carts powered by something that ran absolutely silently. She stopped before the statue, on the lowest tier of its surrounding platform.

"It's lovely." The white, shiny material used for the houses was woven amongst a sky-blue crystalline substance which seemed to hold its own inner glow. Like the rest of the native architecture, it seemed to be based on triangles. But in those abstract angles, she could see people, skies, starships. Then she shifted her head and they were just angles and lines again.

"Pythagoras would've loved it," Jake said, but she chose to ignore that. He didn't seem captivated - no art lover, then.

"There's an inscription." Tegan climbed the steps, which were really an ascending spiral around the sculpture, and hunched down in front of the plinth to read it.

Jake stared at it blankly. He cleared his throat and asked, "Can I have those, uh, square doubloons?"

"What? Why? They're useless."

"I want to try."

She shrugged and dug into her jacket for them, almost losing her balance on the step. She handed them over with a grimace

"Can you tell if any of these shops would sell beer?"

She laughed at the ridiculousness of the request and glanced around; pointed him towards a sign that apparently literally read as 'Pleasant Fermented Drinks'. "I don't know what you think you're going to buy with useless coins from a storekeeper whose language you don't even speak," she scoffed.

"You think?" He cocked his head at her innocently, then turned and jogged off across the angular paving. She was still laughing at him as he disappeared inside the shop. The natives paid him no more heed than they did her interest in the sculpture.

The sculpture. Tegan turned back to it now, trailing over the writing with her fingers. It was faded and almost obscured in places - the plinth was older, and the rest must have been renewed in the years between. She read, '_To the dead of two races_'...

It was, she realised with a cold shiver through her brain that dulled her appreciation a little, a war memorial.

There were dates listed that meant nothing to her, and a few names - place names? There weren't enough of them to be individuals. She looked at the aged stone plinth, and wondered, and felt another chill.

She turned and addressed a green/yellow/blue clad man walking past. "Excuse me - do you mind if I ask a question?"

He sketched a gesture that she knew, thanks to the TARDIS, to be a permissive one. _Ask_.

"I'm new here and I wondered - how many years ago was the war, exactly?"

"The war? Nearly five hundred revolutions." He seemed surprised - that she didn't know, _and_ that she was interested, she supposed, There was no reluctance in him to answer, no offence. The memorial statue was upkept as a matter of civic duty, likely, and no more than that. "The Trimethians were almost destroyed before they surrendered. History now." His gesture there was dismissive.

"And you've been at peace for a long time."

"Of course."

She was glad she'd read that vibe correctly. She gazed up at the memorial, then distractedly turned to thank the man, and found him already walking away. She shouted her thanks at his retreating back.

Tegan let the sculpture reclaim her attention. Sitting askew on the steps, staring up at its colours, it was easy to lose herself in its shifting geometric visions. Eventually a shadow fell over her. She blinked up at its source. Jake, smirking, with a green meshed net woven around a circle of small bottles swinging from his hand.

She gaped. "How did you do that?"

"I have had to get by in a few countries where I didn't speak the language on Earth," he said. He poked a finger into his own chest. "I am an international super-spy."

"But the coins were worthless!"

"I guess you never know what's worth something. Hey, lead could be a precious metal here, or a completely unknown substance. The guy in the shop seemed happy enough with the trade, anyway."

"Well - well done!" she said, astonished. "I guess you have your uses." She pinched his arm.

"Uh, thanks." He eyed her warily. "I guess we should be getting back, before they find out we're gone."

"It's probably too late for that already." She snorted. "Besides, it's not like I _have_ to ask permission to go out." She frowned, and gave him a studying look. "I suppose you did, working for those people."

"Kinda. I mean, if I wanted to head out for more than a day or - anyway, it's not... I just don't want the others to worry."

No wonder, Tegan thought, that he'd jumped at a chance to explore the universe in an alien spacecraft. Maybe he wasn't as nuts as she'd thought. "Okay."

"Hang on." She halted her progress and looked back. He'd dropped to one knee and set the net of bottles aside to strip slippers and bandages off his feet. He pulled the slippers back on over barely-reddened skin. They were loose and flopped in ungainly fashion as he stood up, pulling the gauze from his hands. Underneath, his hands were still visibly burned, but the burns looked a week or two old, and not far from healed. He stopped with the bundle in his hand and cursed.

"Ha. Good luck recognising an alien dustbin," Tegan laughed. "You can't leave that in the street, I'm sure it must be a biohazard in some way or other. You'll have to carry it back to the TARDIS now. Here, I'll take the liquid refreshment." She plucked it from the floor without waiting for a response.

He balled up the gauze and shoved it into his jeans pocket. "If you're doing that 'cause you're hoping to drink it, sad to inform you that we've another puzzle to figure out when we get back - how to open the caps."

Tegan looked down at the neat circle of tops secured on the bottles by an unfathomable collection of tabs and black wire. "Oh, rabbits!"

* * *

Jake exchanged a worried glance with Tegan as they hesitated outside the partially open door. The collision of his headache with the irritated oratory floating from inside the TARDIS made him wince.

"Why people persistently fail to heed a simple, sensible piece of advice is quite beyond me. 'Stay here with the TARDIS.' 'Don't go wandering off on unknown planets and alien ships.' But what do I get? '_Out for a walk - back soon._'"

"Don't worry," Tegan hissed. "His bark's worse than his bite."

He eyed her dubiously. Over the course of the last few hours, she had turned into a tentative ally, something which he had not expected - but he knew the position could prove temporary. He watched as, far bolder than he, she pushed the door fully open and ventured inside, interrupting the weary diatribe with a "Hello, Doc" that didn't quite manage not to sound guilty.

The Doctor spun about, brandishing the yellow post-it note she'd left on the console. "A walk?" he repeated. Behind him, Adric was sliding the last few pieces into place on the alien puzzle with his attention rather deliberately focused upon his hands. Nyssa stood uncertainly with her arms folded, and looked as though she was contemplating the wisdom of intervening.

"For some air," Jake added. He felt awkward, on the one hand not wanting to hide behind Tegan's skirts and on the other very much aware that he was the stranger here, the guest. He did not want to seem ungrateful to the Doctor for letting him travel with them.

"I spent most of the last week in jail," Tegan supplemented, dangerously. There was a moment's exchange of equally stubborn accusation from both sides before she relented, reassuring the Doctor with a sigh, "We were all right, Doctor. Really." The net of bottles was held low against her thigh, half-covered by her draped jacket, and it seemed she'd forgotten them in the moment. But now she manouevred herself around the console room so that she kept the net out of the Doctor's sight, and once the console was between them she slipped it down underneath, where they could retrieve it later. "There's a bit of a town at the bottom of the mountain, and the people were friendly and everything."

"It was really interesting," Jake offered. His voice trailed off as he registered how intently the Doctor was eying his feet.

"My slippers," the alien said morosely.

Jake followed his gaze downwards. "Uh... sorry." The blue slippers were in a sad state after being used to climb down, and back up, a mountainside. "I--" He envisaged Tegan's reaction if he completed the statement 'I couldn't let her go alone' and stopped.

But the Doctor sighed and rubbed his forehead with his fingers, perhaps remembering why it must have been necessary for Jake to purloin his oversized fuzzy footwear in the first place. When he looked up again, Jake felt his eyes take in the new absence of bandaging, and his expression cleared somewhat. "Very well. I'm relieved to see you both back in one piece."

There was something about his tone that suggested they were only evading a severe ticking off because he was feeling very magnanimous indeed and they had been extremely lucky to avoid disaster. It had been impossible not to notice in his confrontation with the NSA that, for a guy who didn't look more than a few years Jake's senior, the Doctor had a remarkable ability to reduce grown men and women, NSA directors, generals and heavily armed soldiers to guilty twelve-year-olds.

"Did you sort out the ship's defences?" Tegan asked, snapping up the opportunity to change the subject.

"No," said the Doctor, some of his short temper returning. He cast a glare at Adric, who was still pretending to be oblivious.

"We've found the right systems," Nyssa elaborated keenly. "It shouldn't take much longer now. And Adric found something else interesting."

The Doctor's sour face didn't change, and Jake figured that a clue as to why he'd become so touchy about people wandering off. He supposed the captain of a ship was undeniably responsible for his crew's safety even if he _wasn't_ the good-as guardian of half his young crew and if the 'ship' in question looked like a blue British phone booth.

"I want to tell them!" Adric spoke up, coming alive all of a sudden, and launched into an excited babble about warships and live bombs.

"Really?" Jake asked.

"Surely that's all the more reason we should be getting out of here!" Tegan exclaimed, alarmed. Her jaw dropped in horrified, late realisation. "Hang on - what about the town? All those people, they'd be right in the path if the mountainside was blown up, even if they weren't caught in the blast-- How much firepower is in this thing?"

"Don't be stupid," Adric said scornfully. "It's been here ages, and survived the original crash. Whatever their missiles are made with, it's stable. We're all perfectly safe."

"Now, now, Adric." The Doctor clasped a quelling hand to the boy's shoulder, cutting short the exchange of glares. "It's just possible this planet has been very lucky. Tegan's right - once we've made the computer's central defences safe we ought to inform the local authorities... Are you quite all right, Tegan? Tegan?"

Her expression had glazed over, but the Doctor's voice snapped her back to reality. "Oh, I -- I'm sorry. Doctor, I just thought of something."

Jake saw the snort gathering on Adric's face. But whatever comment was brewing, he hadn't chance to voice it before Tegan launched off her unfathomable question.

"--Doctor, do you think this ship could have been here for _five hundred_ years?"


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

The Doctor hunched under a control panel, hands buried deep in the machine-guts of the warship, head and shoulders out of sight, just two bent knees clad in stripy trousers poking comfortably enough out of the machinery. Periodically, his muffled voice emerged from the innards of the ship along with, less frequently, a pointed hand. The voice invariably shouted an equation or problem, to which Adric shouted back a response. The hand usually pointed in the rough direction of Jake Foley, indicating a question it deemed appropriate for the human to attempt. Adric answered most of those, too.

It was apparent that the Doctor had remembered his promise, made quite some time ago, to work on Adric's mathematics. And he'd decided it wouldn't hurt to do some work on Jake's at the same time. Adric found himself unable to argue with the idea since, in the opinion he'd been biting his lip on for about an hour already, Jake was _rubbish_. He wasn't answering even a quarter of the basic questions the Doctor insisted on firing at him first. Although maybe, just maybe, there had been some slight improvement as they progressed.

"If these nanites of yours are computers," Adric said finally, interrupting the steam of problem/response and problem/pause/response, unable to keep his curiosity in any longer, no matter how rude and obvious the Doctor would inevitably consider it. "That means you have computers in your brain. Can't they do the calculations for you? I don't understand why you have to get so many _wrong_."

"_Adric_." The Doctor sighed. "What have we said about manners?"

"I know, Doctor," he defended. "But how am I supposed to learn anything if I have to sit on all the interesting questions?"

"Tact," said the Doctor meaningfully, "Is a learned skill."

But Jake was just blinking between them, or between Adric and the Doctor's feet, and he didn't look remotely offended. All he looked was apathetic. "The nanites don't work that way. I don't think they have enough processing power of their own. Maybe they could someday, but they're not programmed to right now. They are still experimental - I'm sure Diane will get to it in time." He looked thoughtful. "That would actually be pretty cool." He narrowed his eyes at Adric. "Come back in a few years and we'll see if I can give you a run for your money then."

"It wouldn't count anyway." Adric tapped the side of his head. "This is natural skill."

Inside his console, the Doctor made a sound of disapproval, but he didn't expand on it. Instead he said to Jake, "I'm not convinced it's a good idea to encourage these people to continue experimenting on you. Accidental exposure is one thing--"

"I already have to live with the nanites," Jake protested. "And if I already have to live with the nanites, why shouldn't they be _better_ nanites?"

Adric supposed it was a reasonable argument. It was possible that the Doctor did, too, because after a moment, he just posed another mathematical problem. Adric answered it. Too easy. He felt a little bit guilty when he saw Jake's half-open lips, but the Doctor hadn't pointed.

Jake was improving, he decided, over the course of the next several equations. Maybe the human had just been rusty. And he knew a lot more than Tegan did, which did raise Adric's estimation of humans as a race. Tegan often made him wonder how humans had ever got to be so populous and widespread in the future-universe.

"Ah!" the Doctor exclaimed finally, talking over a rather fine solution that, annoyingly, fled Adric's thoughts instantly. "Yes - I think that should do it." He stood up and rubbed his hands together, then poked a button on the console. Nothing happened.

Apparently nothing happening was good, because the Doctor waited a moment and then beamed around them. "It looks like we're all wrapped up here. So - let's get back to Tegan and Nyssa in the TARDIS, and I'll plot a course to the nearest large city. We'll inform the authorities of this ship's incendiary payload, then be on our way. There's a rather pleasant ocean planet in the Sefis Nebula that I think we'd all rather enjoy, and Tegan does love to swim. You _are_ waterproof?" He eyed Jake. "Yes? Excellent!"

Picking up his hat and squashing it between his palms, he prepared to move on.

Something _clicked_, loudly enough that the sound seemed to fill the whole room, and the Doctor froze mid-step a fraction of a second before alarms started blaring that made Adric (and Adric was secretly relieved to note, also Jake) jump.

"This can't possibly be good," the Doctor said in his most worried voice.

"What is it?" Jake asked. He looked to both of them for answers, but Adric couldn't appreciate the experience properly, he didn't know any more than the human did.

The Doctor ran over to one of the working consoles, jabbing quick-fire at buttons that he'd been cautious about touching before. Adric watched a screen flicker to life and the Doctor read something from it that was too far away to make out.

"Oh, dear."

The Doctor's 'oh dear' was very worrying for such a mild, innocuous phrase. Where other people might resort to stronger language and some thoroughly sensible panicking, the Doctor said 'oh dear'. 'Oh dear, we're moments away from a supernova.' 'Oh dear, the flesh-eating Kimfean invasion force is ready to attack.' 'Oh dear, the planet's about to explode.'

...Or maybe not the _planet_.

"Self-destruct sequence," the Doctor said tersely. "Somehow, I must have managed to activate it when I disconnected the power. It must be another security measure, to prevent the ship falling into enemy hands. I should have noticed--!"

"Doctor, how long?" Adric cried.

"Countdown from a thousand, approximately three-point-one seconds in between numbers..."

"About fifty-two minutes." It sounded like a lot of time, but it wasn't. It had just taken them nearly two days to turn the ship's defences off.

"I was just going to say that," the Doctor murmured. He frowned and leaned over the console, hands splayed on its edge, concentration intense. "We have just under an hour to stop this ship exploding. Maybe I should have left well enough alone."

"Too late now," Jake said. "We need to do something!"

"We should get out of here," Adric pressed. Wasn't that part self-evident at least? "I don't want to explode, Doctor."

"You're forgetting about the village, Adric. Tegan was right, earlier, an explosion here could bury them beneath half the mountainside. And if the payload catches, the explosion would be massive. We can't leave. I'm responsible for this, and I'm going to put it right." He tore the front panel off the console, with little care for his hands. An unfathomable collection of wires gaped out of the hole at them. The Doctor groaned. He dropped to his knees in front of the console and reached inside, but his hand faltered. It was obvious he had no clear idea where to start.

"Jake," the Doctor said heavily. "I realise we haven't had a lot of joy from this so far, but I very much need you to interface with the ship and turn the self-destruct mechanism _off_."

"But you can do it," Jake contradicted, hopeful, desperate, pleading for this not to rest on him. "Or if we all start pulling wires--"

"I'm nowhere near familiar enough with this technology. Our best chance right now is _you_," the Doctor insisted. "Talk to the computer. I know you can do it! Lives may very well be depending on it, Jake! I can't stop this in the time we have. You have to _try_ - and keep trying."

"It hasn't worked already! Twice! We're wasting time--"

"Yes, we are!" the Doctor blazed back. Even Adric winced.

"All right." Jake grimaced down at the console. "All right."

The human's face blanked and he took on that look. The one where it was almost possible, or at least so it seemed, to see the flicker of circuitry at work within his eyes. It disconcerted Adric. Despite his earlier words, he didn't really want to see the affable human acting anything like a computer.

Jake's face stayed that way for what seemed an awfully long time, while the alarm continued to blare and the countdown Adric could now see on the screen ticked inexorably downwards. Somehow, it had passed 800 already. Adric suspected it was speeding up, or maybe the intervals between numbers weren't supposed to be regular. The Doctor's knuckles were white where he held the corner of the console.

When something finally happened, more than Jake's face changed. He dropped to his knees with a terrific jolt.

But the alarms and the countdown stopped too, leaving a silence that felt very, very complete.

Jake raised his hands to his head as if it hurt.

"I knew you could do it," the Doctor said, but even his congratulating excitement sounded hushed. He touched his hand to Jake's shoulder, and Adric came forward to help, too. Between them they tried to get the human back onto his feet. "You _are_ all right?"

Jake brushed off the Doctor's concern, with a breathless, "Just... just disoriented. Damn, I need some Tylenol."

"I'm sure Nyssa will have something suited to your metabolism, back in the TARDIS." He hesitated and grimaced around. "Will you be all right heading back on your own? Adric and I need to make sure the countdown isn't going to start up again, before we all leave."

"Yeah," Jake said. Bleary-eyed, he patted the Doctor's shoulder. "Yeah, I'm... no problem. I'll just--" He winced and held his head, but his steps were steady, if slow, as he started to head off.

He paused in the doorway. Turned back to spout the proof, Adric's _forgotten_ proof, of the Doctor's last mathematical problem.

* * *

His head felt like it was about to crack open. And yeah, he could just visualise his brains dribbling out of it like jelly. After the past few days, it was a wonder they weren't already leaking from his ears.

When, he asked himself sourly, had being on an _alien planet_, in an _alien spaceship_, with _aliens_, ceased to be a matter of _whoa_ and started to twist in his gut?

Exploring the spaceship, the dalek-that-wasn't, the fight... and he'd done what he was, well, built for; he'd protected these people. Why, then, did he feel like this? Edgy, disoriented...

Did he want to go back to Earth? Jake tested the thought. He missed Diane, and Kyle, but it wasn't a urgent feeling of loss, they would be there when he got back. And the sorry truth was that at the NSA he was never much less out of his depth than on an alien planet.

He snorted to himself at the thought, paused in the corridor of the warship, leaning against the wall while he scrubbed his hands through his hair, as though he could shake his headache loose. It didn't work.

Maybe he needed air. He'd felt all right outside before, with Tegan, once they'd got a little way down the mountain. Maybe the air was thin up here, or he'd needed to clear the mould-and-dust air of the ancient, abandoned ship from his lungs.

Or maybe, he considered wryly, it had been a matter of interacting with someone who seemed to feel just as clumsy and ignorant among the company in the TARDIS as he did.

He made himself move from the wall, supporting his weight on his own two feet. It wasn't so much tiredness - the nanites dealt with the symptoms of that pretty well - more a lack of motivation to move, and inability to summon the will for effort.

He hoped he wasn't going to come down with some weird alien disease the nanites wouldn't know how to deal with. _That_ would pretty much suck.

It wasn't far to the TARDIS. He moved his heavy feet down the corridor, taking each step at a time. Walking had never felt such hard work. Even the air felt warm and thick, and seemed to tug at him like glue.

He would get back to the TARDIS and find some wacky alien painkillers, and then he would go lie down until the Doctor, or Adric, or whoever, woke him up to tell him they were on the ocean planet. He hadn't done a lot of swimming since the accidental change in his status at the NSA. Come to think of it, he hadn't done a whole hell of a lot of things just trying out the nanites for his own purposes, when he stopped to think about all the things that were out there to do. He was pretty sure that ocean swimming with the nanites' enhancements would be _brilliant_.

He almost didn't see the TARDIS until he walked into it, hands to the blue-painted woodwork - far too flimsy, wood, to contain a time/space ship, explanations about 'chameleon circuits' aside. Jake held on to it, stumbling around its sides to find the door, and its surface seemed to saw at his fingers like it was rough and raw with splinters, not sanded smooth and painted over. His head thudded.

The door was locked. Of course. He bashed on it with an open palm, forgetting to dilute his nano-strength - but the door held implacably nonetheless. The flimsiness of the wood was an illusion.

It opened up beneath his palm and he stumbled as its support dropped from him. Nyssa was standing at the console with her hand on the lever.

"Jake," she said, faintly reproaching. She hesitated and her lips pursed in concern. "Are you all right? You look terrible. Did something happen?" Her expression froze. "Where are the Doctor and Adric?"

They were all the family she had left now, Jake didn't need to remind himself. "They're fine," he assured her quickly. "They're following on. I came back first. Not feeling too great. I don't suppose you have such a thing as extra strength Tylenol stowed away in here anywhere?"

She clearly didn't recognise the name. "I doubt it," she said, turning away from the console, leaving the door open for the Doctor. "But I'm sure I can find you something. Headache?"

"Great-granddaddy of headache." The glib line belied his growing desperation. There was a rushing sensation gathering inside his head, like rising water, threatening to flood everything else out.

Nyssa padded out of the console room. Her footsteps might have been soundless in her soft shoes, but he couldn't be sure it wasn't something wrong with his hearing. Jake leaned forward into his own steps - head lowered, grinding the heel of his hand into his forehead - as he followed her.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

Nyssa opened the cupboard in the TARDIS lab where the medicines were kept and scanned the contents. As she turned to ask a question, she realised that Jake, who had been right behind her, was there no longer. She paused, then ventured back into the corridor.

"Oh," she said softly as she saw him. He leaned against a roundelled wall, halfway to his knees. His hands clenched against the edge of a roudel, his knuckles white. She couldn't see his face. But she'd seen something like this happen before. "Jake!" Her concern spiked when he didn't respond. "Jake, what's wrong? Is it the TARDIS again? Here, let me help you--"

She touched his shoulder and he threw her off with a guttural noise. She staggered, catching her balance only because her back hit the opposing corridor wall. The impact knocked the breath from her.

When she looked back up, he was standing without support. His back was to her, and it struck her immediately that his posture was very strange - very straight, with locked-limb, jerky movements like a rudimentary wooden puppet. His balance was not good, seeming almost to desert him at any shift in posture.

"Jake...?" Nyssa tried again cautiously.

Then he turned around, and her concern turned to fear. There was something about his eyes...

He took three long-limbed steps to reach her, and she could see, even in her fright, that his co-ordination was improving with every step. By the time he reached his hands for her, his movements were almost steady - and still very straight, and very purposeful.

She ducked under his arm and ran back down the corridor toward the console room. She didn't know where Tegan had gone, but thought her friend was probably resting. Nyssa had to get to the Doctor and Adric. The Doctor would deal with this.

She hadn't realised how fast Jake was. Fast like nothing she had ever seen, flesh or machine. An arm reached past her to slam shut the door in front even as another curled about her waist, stopping her painfully short mid-sprint. She was too busy gasping for breath to struggle much, and when she did snatch a breath she didn't use it for struggle.

"Tegan!" she yelled as loudly as she could. She could at least try to deliver a warning. She didn't want him to find Tegan in her sleep. "Tegan, run! Hide! It's Jake, he's gone--"

His hand closed over her mouth, and she hoped Tegan had heard. He carried her back to the lab, without particular effort despite the fact her feet dangled inches off the floor. Once there he shut the door, and bent a length of thick wire that had lain on a bench into two loops around her wrists. The material flowed like rubber in his hands, but she couldn't find in it even the slightest give. It wasn't twisted tight, but the loops were too small to slip over her hands. She hadn't realised he was so strong. He didn't use it, except by accident, in clumsiness. Frustrated and fuming now that the original shock had faded, she gave up.

Jake hadn't spoken. When she raised her head again, he was looking at her.

"Why are you doing this?" she angrily asked, as he turned his back - apparently he was satisfied, having watched her struggles, that she would not free herself. "Jake? Please - talk to me, Jake."

And it occurred to her then that he had not done that. Not since he was overcome with pain in the corridor had he spoken a word to her, as though language was incidental to his purpose. Then there was his businesslike manner and machinelike movements; passionless, inhuman. His eyes... What had looked out of them at her hadn't been Jake.

His headaches, she thought, hadn't been caused by the _TARDIS_.

"I know what you are," she said. It came out as almost a whisper. This was not the crisis she had argued with the Doctor about.

Her words made no impact upon his retreating back. "_Jake_." She ran the few yards across to him, tugging on his arm with her bound hands. He turned to regard her with impassive, minimal interest. "No... you're nothing like Jake, are you? But he's still in there. Can he hear me? Jake, _can_ you hear me!"

Nyssa thought she saw a flicker of life in his eyes for the briefest instant before it died. But no, she concluded sadly, the control that had been established over him was too great. And she knew for certain now.

She whispered, unable to hide how the idea frightened and appalled her, "You're the ship's computer."

Nothing in Jake's borrowed eyes either confirmed, denied, or even acknowledged her. He pushed her away with a strength that wouldn't be denied, albeit no excessive force, and left the lab. The door closed and she heard him do something to the lock on the other side.

She was left to beat her hands futilely on the door, and just as uselessly shout his name.

* * *

Quite unconsciously, Adric found his steps quickening on his way back through the crashed warship to the TARDIS. When he realised what he was doing, it made him double-take, but didn't slow his steps by much. Apparently the Doctor wasn't the only one who was worried about Jake. But then the human _had_ looked very grey when he'd stumbled off.

It hadn't taken the Doctor more than ten minutes to talk himself around to sending Adric after him.

The TARDIS door was open. That was nothing remarkable in itself - it had been open much of the time, as they were in and out. There was no physical threat here, after all, and as for any non-physical ones, well, the TARDIS had its own defences against those. But all the same Adric paused, feeling a small chill as though something undefined was wrong. He frowned as he encouraged his feet to ignore their better judgement and walk inside.

Nobody was in the console room, but he was almost immediately aware that he could hear running footsteps, gaining volume. A moment later, Tegan burst in through the interior door, looking a bit dishevelled and yelling "Nyssa!" in a breathless voice.

Her frantic eyes caught Adric instead and she stared at him blankly a moment before she burst out, "I thought I heard something. Did you hear anything?"

"Only you." He didn't see how she could reasonably expect him to hear anything _else_, wherever she was around.

"Have you seen Nyssa?" she snapped. "Adric, I'm worried - I thought I heard her scream. I think she's in trouble."

"What could she possibly be in trouble from, here?" He was about to go into detail about the TARDIS' defences, but he recalled his bad feeling of moments before, and didn't. He admitted, "I think something might be wrong, too." He looked around furtively at the empty console room. "Jake was supposed to come back here. If you haven't seen him, maybe something's happened to him, too."

Tegan grimaced. "Nanoboy? I definitely don't want to meet something that could happen to him! But I don't understand, there's nothing here! Unless it's another of those whatcha-call-its. Those illusions the Doctor said they tangled with before."

"It can't be," Adric said, "We just cut the power."

"Maybe you made something else mad!"

Adric nodded. It was as good a theory as any more scientific one he had to hand, since he had precisely none. "We should go back and fetch the Doctor," he declared.

"You fetch the Doctor. I'm going to keep looking for Nyssa."

There was no opportunity to argue with her, because Jake crashed through the door as though it had done something pretty awful to offend him. Tegan, who was closest, jumped sharply and backed off a step. "Jake? What the--?" She backed off several more steps as he turned to look at her, but Adric wasn't sure what she'd seen in his face.

"Jake, the Doctor sent me after you. We were worried." The words didn't seem to register. He watched Jake walk around the console, clearly aiming for the open door, and caught his arm as he passed close. "Wait, you can't go out. You're not well. The Doctor will be back soon, at least wait until then."

Jake broke his grip and shoved him away, using all the his enhanced strength. Adric yelped as he landed on top of the console. His feet had left the ground! He rolled off again, fighting dizziness. Looking up in astonishment, he finally had a full view of the human's blank expression - what Tegan had seen and absorbed already.

"We've got to stop him," Tegan said, with a peculiar hushed anguish, as Jake headed once more for the door. "Adric, you saw it - something's got to him. I think he's possessed." And he supposed that after Deva Loka, she would know if anyone would how to recognise the signs. "Who knows what's got him, or what it intends to make him do! We can't let it!"

"Don't--" Adric began blurrily.

He supposed too that it was her hypersensitivity to the issue after the Mara that fuelled her determination in tackling him despite the fact that - and he wasn't even going to waste his breath in pointing it out to her - the nanite-enhanced Foley was far stronger than one silly ordinary human female. Adric groaned. Jake hadn't even been interested in them. They could have let him go on his way while they found the Doctor.

He winced, watching Jake trying to throw Tegan off as she clung to his waist, his arm, his T-shirt, her grip slowly sliding despite her surprisingly good impression of a Seddarian limpet. All the while she was shouting, "Jake Foley! You're Jake Foley, from Earth! You have to remember who you are and fight this! Throw them off - you can do it, Jake!"

Adric didn't see any flicker in his expression to suggest her words had an impact, but he could see that Jake was - Jake's body was - gathering himself to strike her, and with that kind of strength, if he hit her then she wasn't going to be getting up again anytime soon, if at all.

Adric supposed he would have to help her. He surged to his feet and grabbed Jake's arm. It wasn't in time to prevent him sending Tegan flying, but it did absorb some of the force of the blow. He was aware of her on the floor behind him, dazed but moving. Now he just had to worry about himself.

He tried to meet the human's eyes. Tegan hadn't managed to make eye contact - perhaps that would get through to the real Jake, wherever he was buried. "Jake, you know she's right," he pleaded, as the enhanced human shook him, trying to dislodge him - Adric would've been all too happy to be dislodged if he'd thought there was any chance he wouldn't end up pasted against the nearest wall or ceiling in the process. "You have to remember who you are. We're your friends."

He could've hoped for that last to have more impact, but since mostly all he'd done so far in their relatively short acquaintance was to poke fun at the human's equations, he probably ought to have formed a more logically realistic prediction that it wouldn't. Instead, Jake tossed him into the wall with an audible, painful '_crack_', scanned the room with his impassively controlled gaze, then continued on his way as though neither of them had ever stood in it.

Adric tried to rise to one knee and groaned as it proved to be just as ill-advised an idea as he'd thought it would. He fell back.

"Adric... Tegan!"

Nyssa stood in the door, her pale face oddly reddened in patches on the right hand side. Her arms were secured in front of her and there were obvious burns on her hands and arm from some kind of a laser cutter, and a sheen of sweat on her skin. Her eyes stared past them to Jake's vanishing figure, and returned glazed with a manic intensity.

"We have to warn the Doctor," she said. "Tell the Doctor that he has to stop Jake."

"Good luck with that," Adric said, pained, hunching over his ankle. "I think it's broken."

"Tegan--"

"I'll go." She lurched upright clutching her head. "You stay with Adric."

"What's the hurry anyhow?" Adric asked fearfully, sure that Nyssa had figured out something he'd missed.

"The warship's computer - it has control over Jake," she said. "I don't know exactly how, but... Tegan, a computer completes its programming. That's its function, it's mission. And we _know_ this ship's last mission." If it was possible, she'd gone even paler. "There are at least a dozen missiles still capable of detonation on this vessel, and a whole population of the enemy out there. It _can_ still complete its mission - _it_ doesn't know this planet is at peace now. All of those people... we have to warn the Doctor and save them, somehow!"


End file.
